The context of meaning is everyday life: Venturi and Scott Brown's theories of architecture and urbanism.

摘要

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's architectural and urban theories', were significant forces in the shift from modernism to postmodernism in the 1960s and 1970s. Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) is usually said to have reintroduced "history" into architecture, inaugurating the "postmodern period." But in fact, at Princeton, where architecture and art history were branches of the same discipline, Venturi was educated to think of history in terms of the expression of meaning in the context of experience. Gestalt theory provided a theory of how architecture was understood in a context.Whereas Venturi used the word expression to refer to a relatively undefined relationship between form and meaning, in Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour developed an explicit theory of meaning that was similar to, although not derived from, semotic theory. Learning from Las Vegas posited a conventional theory of meaning, based on the picturesque theory of association, and embedded in the social world. These ideas were derived from a mixture of sources that included the planning theories of Melvin Webber and David Crane, and the contemporary interdisciplinary discussion of perception and communication in the visual arts. Their theory was given concrete form in the idea of the decorated shed, "shelter with symbols on it." Pursuing the idea of the reception of architecture by means of association, Venturi and Scott Brown were led to study the built productions of "ordinary persons." This impulse was part of a general realist trend in photography and journalism which included the essays of J. B. Jackson and Tom Wolfe, and the photography of Edwin Ruscha and Steven Shore. This interest in the "architecture of the everyday" also had multiple sources, especially in the architectural criticism of Alison and Peter Smithson and the cultural theories of Herbert Gans. The results of their study were displayed in the Signs of Life Exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, in 1976.